December 7–14, 2000

cover story

A Lighter Shade Of Owl, part 2

Outside the hall: Gladfelter Hall at Temple University, the eighth floor of which houses the school’s tumultuous African-American Studies department.
photo: Ron Coalson

Is Temple University gutting its world-famous African American Studies program?

by Daryl Gale

part 1 | part 2

Goodheart says that in the mid-1990s enrollment was down in all categories, but cites a recent upsurge as an encouraging sign. She’s also careful to point out that Temple’s multicultural campus is one of its strengths.

"Temple is nothing if not completely inclusive, and we remain committed to that policy," she says. "There is no concerted effort to recruit suburban students as opposed to city students, and certainly no effort to recruit any one ethnicity over any other. In fact, we’re getting more and better students from the city and the suburbs. We are hardly turning our backs on any population."

Dr. Lemuel Berry of Morehead State University is executive director of the National Association of African-American Studies, and had heard of the ongoing controversy at Temple, as well as the accusations by the students and faculty of institutionalized racism on the part of the university. He says it’s not that rare a phenomenon to have a school "re-evaluate" its minority studies programs in order to attract more non-minority students.

"Temple is not alone," Berry says. "African-American studies, Latino studies and Native American studies programs are being surreptitiously challenged all over the country. That, in our view, is a negative approach. Most of the world are ‘people of color’ and our colleges and universities must support programs geared toward students of color. Not because it’s politically correct, but because it’s the right thing to do academically. But without the full support and cooperation at the highest levels of the university, those programs cannot succeed. When you see John Chaney coach a Temple game, who’s in the stands? Mostly white people. Who’s on the court? Mostly ‘people of color.’ If African Americans are good enough to make universities millions of dollars through sports programs, if it’s okay to take millions of dollars in donations and scholarships from African Americans like Bill Cosby, then how can you possibly justify not giving the African-American Studies department the full support and funding of the university?"

When Dr. Joyce Ann Joyce took over the chair of the department in the summer of 1997, she made immediate, sweeping changes that turned the department on its head.

"I saw everything that happened, and I just couldn’t believe it," says Sekai Zankel, who had been head secretary of the African-American Studies department for nine years under Dr. Asante when Dr. Joyce took over. "She changed the locks on my office the very first day, and made me switch offices three times over the next few months. I was on her hit list before she arrived, because of my loyalty and relationship to Dr. Asante. She actually said to my face, ‘You can’t work for me because you worked for Asante.’ I told her I work for Temple University, and the African-American Studies department. She then had me remove all the Kente cloth, all the African pictures, and anything else African-oriented from around the department. Can you imagine that? In the African-American studies department? Then she moved me out and stripped me of most of my responsibilities. For at least the first year or so, I thought I was in hell. Dr. Joyce created the most hostile environment I’ve ever seen in a professional setting. I actually became physically sick because of the stress."

Zankel says that Joyce began treating her a little better after Zankel took her grievance to her union, but the tension and bitterness in the department remained.

"Let’s just say that Dr. Joyce is an extremely difficult person to get along with or work with. We had a strong, prosperous program under Dr. Asante. In 1995, there were more than 250 graduate students. We took in new students at a rate of 40 per year and rising. When I left in March of this year it was a ghost town," Zankel says, her voice rising in anger. "The whole thing has me disgusted. We were making a difference, we were changing the lives of young African people through education. It was beautiful. The hardest thing for me was to watch Dr. Joyce destroy what we’d worked so hard to build."

Despite her detractors at Temple and even some from previous positions, Dr. Joyce, who is African American, is by no means without fans and supporters. Dr. Marie Davidson retired last year from the University of Maryland, where she was well acquainted with Joyce.

"I’ve known Joyce for close to 20 years," Davidson says, "since she was a young English professor at the University of Maryland. I’ve always known her as a person of high standards for herself and her students. It saddens me to hear of her troubles at Temple, because those allegations do not reflect the Joyce I’ve known and worked with. In fact, at UM she was known as a tireless advocate for students, particularly African-American students."

E. Ethelbert Miller, director of the African-American Studies Resource Center at Howard University, offers another explanation for the flap. Miller says he and Joyce have been friends for years, and that at least part of the whole brouhaha can be attributed to personality clash.

"Joyce is a good friend and a good scholar. She’s a strong-willed person, she’s blunt and she’s direct. That in itself tends to turn some people off. Couple that with the fact that she took over the position of someone who was essentially a legend. It would have been extremely difficult for anyone to take over the department after such a charismatic and popular leader as Dr. Asante, but for someone with their own approach and agenda completely different from Dr. Asante’s, it would be almost impossible. What bothers me most is that these kinds of personality clashes and squabbles do a real disservice to the field of African-American studies, and we as scholars should put an end to it."

But Zankel, like Drs. Asante and Mazama and Pamela Reed, suggests that the department’s troubles involved something more than just a personality clash.

"Temple has proven themselves to be a racist institution," Zankel says. "The department got no support from the university even during our best years in the early and mid ’90s. They froze our hiring and our budget, and tried their best to cap our growth. Temple was losing white students in droves and desperately wanted to attract them back. And us with our African garb and our cultural awareness was not the image they wanted to present. They really wanted to get rid of us completely, I think, but couldn’t afford to be seen doing it. You know, like they say in the Mafia movies, ‘Make it look like an accident.’ So they did. They hired a department chair who destroyed it from the inside, so they could just stand there and watch the crime without being blamed for it."

Zankel, who has been on medical leave from the university since March, says Joyce was given carte blanche to punish her enemies, which was the vast majority of the faculty. She cut core courses, cancelled the automatic upgrade into the Ph.D. program for master’s graduates, transferred and re-transferred instructors, publicly berated staff and students alike, and in a single stroke, cut more than 40 teaching assistantships in the department. One of those teaching assistants was Pamela Reed.

"I was teaching a course called ‘Africa in the 20th Century,’" Reed says, "and Dr. Joyce fired off one of her blizzard of memos that said the teaching assistants who hadn’t taken a particular course, AAS 750, Teaching African-American Studies at Temple, would be terminated. I’m eminently qualified to teach, and in fact teach a journalism course now at Temple. But the rules of the department were changing day to day under Joyce, and solutions and clarifications were not forthcoming from the Dean or the President. There was a growing concern among students that Joyce was a problem, but the university took a hands-off approach." Reed says that she sent letters to administrators and news releases to Temple publications, but they didn’t respond. The department of African-American Studies Graduate Student Union held meetings, and tried repeatedly to meet with administrators, but were ignored. There were student protests, petitions and rallies, all seeming to fall on deaf ears.

According to Dr. Asante, it was he who made AAS 750 a required course for teaching, but there was ample room for compromise. Asante says Joyce could have easily had the teaching assistants re-register, since AAS 750 wasn’t even on the course schedule at the time. Instead, citing budget considerations, Joyce unilaterally terminated Pamela Reed and more than 40 other teaching assistants.

Reed subsequently filed a lawsuit last July against Temple and Dr. Joyce, represented in the case by Leon Aristotle Williams.

The case is still pending.

	The hero of the department: Dr. Ama Mazama was hailed by Dr. Asante for taking Temple to court over the appointment of a new department chair.
	photo: Ron Coalson

Professor Ama Mazama says that the students and faculty began to rebel against Joyce, and that only made matters worse. She says students held rallies, mounted a sticker and graffiti campaign against Joyce, and vandalized Joyce’s office. Grad students demanded her ouster, but Joyce dug in.

"It got so bad at one point, I had to give a student a core course as independent study just so he could fulfill his requirements," Mazama says. "She [Joyce] was actually preventing students from graduating by cutting their courses. She wouldn’t discuss the plummeting enrollment, or even tell us the number of students in the program. She wouldn’t tell us the budget, just that there was no money. She even denied faculty members access to a copier. She made us wear special passes to be in the department after hours, and took every opportunity to make our lives miserable. Yet somehow, she was given tenure her very first semester, which is unprecedented. Nobody on the faculty could stop her, and she was content to run the department into the ground. I wrote letters and memos to the Dean, the Provost and the President of the university, but like so many others, my protests were ignored."

Dr. Joyce refuses to provide the numbers of students enrolled in the department this year, or any year. And according to Communications Director Harriet Goodheart, Joyce is the only one with the hard data.

But Dr. Asante doesn’t need to see the numbers to confirm what he sees with his own eyes.

"This is by far one of the saddest chapters in Temple University’s history," Asante says dejectedly. "What the administration did to this department has never been done before, as far as I know. They chose our leader, as opposed to allowing us to choose, as is the law. And once committed to Joyce, they stood idly by and watched as the disaster unfolded. Minimizing the Afrocentric movement at Temple has been the goal of the administration for years, and they’ve finally managed to accomplish just that. The tragedy is that it’s difficult enough for African Americans, males in particular, to get into graduate studies programs. And now," he sighs, "the premier African-American Studies department in the country has been decimated and demoralized."

Asante says it’s not too late for the department to make a comeback, especially now that Joyce has announced her resignation. Not too late, but time is still a critical factor. While Temple has consented to let the department staffers choose their own chairperson, they must act soon.

"The university has allowed us to come up with a replacement, but they want us to come up with a person by Dec. 14, only a few weeks away," he says, "and that’s just not enough time. We’re going to need several months to find a candidate with the leadership skills and commitment to African-American studies necessary to bring this department back from the dead."

Asked why he just doesn’t take back the job himself, the job that he made famous and that made him famous, Asante brightens.

"Noooo, not me," he says, "I rather enjoy the role of senior professor and mentor, writer and scholar. I’d rather not go back to the chair, for the same reasons I decided to leave in the first place four years ago. It seems like forever now. But I will take an active role in the selection process, and I’ll give my full support to whomever we choose, knowing that this person supports the program, and has a vision for the future of the department. It’s going to be a long, hard road back to prominence, but I believe in the program, and I believe in our faculty and students."

At least, that sentiment of hope for the future is echoed by Pamela Reed, who, barring more trouble, will receive her doctorate in African-American Studies next spring.

"There has been such hostility and confusion under Joyce. She ran the department through fear, bullying and intimidation," Reed says. "But with her leaving, the department can choose a suitable replacement. There has to be an infusion of new blood and new ideas and new enthusiasm to save the department. We’ve all been under assault under Joyce, and the department is in flux. We need stability and leadership to remove the cloud that’s been hanging over our heads. Without it, the whole department is in serious jeopardy. Temple needs to begin a good faith effort to treat the African-American Studies department with the same respect it gives the other departments."

Reed says she’d like to settle down to write after she graduates, maybe do some consulting or diversity training. But she worries about her future prospects in employment after this, which she cites as the reason for not wanting to be photographed for this story.

"I really hope the stance I’ve taken here at Temple doesn’t adversely affect my career," she says, "but it’s because I love the African-American Studies department and what it stands for that I’ve spoken out. I want to see the department succeed, and I want to see my people freed intellectually."

One thing’s for sure: These past few years at Temple have given Pamela Reed far more education than she bargained for.

part 1 | part 2